How Am I Doing Against the Competition?

You want visitors. Unfortunately, so do your competitors. If
visitors aren’t on your website, you want to know where they’re going, why
they’re going there, and how you stack up against the other players in
your industry.

In addition to monitoring your own website and the communities that
affect your business, you also need to watch your competition.

Site Popularity and Ranking

On the Web, popularity matters. When it comes to
valuations, most startups and media outlets are judged by their monthly
unique visitor count, which is considered a measure of a site’s ability
to reach people. Relevance-based search engine rankings reinforce this,
because sites with more inbound links are generally considered more
authoritative.

Some websites pay marketing firms to funnel traffic to them.
Artificial inflation of visits to the site does nothing to improve
conversion rates. These paid visitors seldom turn into buyers or
contributors, but they do raise the site’s profile with ranking services
such as comScore, which may eventually get the site noticed by others.
That said, raw traffic volumes are a spurious metric for comparing
yourself to others.

Several services, such as Alexa and Compete.com, try to estimate site popularity. Use this data with caution. Alexa, for example, collects data on site activity from browser toolbars, then extrapolates it to the population as a whole. Unfortunately, this approach has many limitations, including problems with SSL visibility ...

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